TeX Live 2008/9 packaging and you

[Bill Nottingham]

Jindrich Novy (jnovy at redhat.com) said: 
> New version texlive-2008 (to be in f12):
> * one single texlive package generating 3944 subpackages / 1065 MiB
> * spec file automagically generated from upstream metadata with
>   http://people.redhat.com/jnovy/files/tl2008/tl2rpm.c
> * upstream collections/packages are separate source tarballs
>   (one could update one small source tarball if a particular style
>   needs update and doesn't need to repack the whole single tarball or
>   patch it)
> * new texlive is maximally scalable depending on which features are
>   needed:
>   - basic installation needs only 12 MiB of packages to be downloaded!
>   - essential features such as pdflatex is supported in this basic
>     scheme
> * it is a full (not truncated or otherwise crippled) version of TeX
>   Live

I'd agree with what others said - 4000 subpackages is a showstopper;
just do it as separate packages. If bootstrapping is a pain, we can
get a custom dist-f12-texlive place to get it going before it lands.

Coming at it from an outside-TeX standpoint: why does *each* package
need separate -doc and -source packages? What's the use case of those?

Bill